[tex-live] Strange license of ukhyphen

[Robin Fairbairns]

>     So if one of you have good contacts with the UKTUG heads I would suggest
>     discussing this topic again.
> 
> I spent a long time writing Phil Taylor, Dominik W., and Graham Toal
> about this, and the current license is the result.  The previous license
> forbade modifications at all, as I recall.  Phil will definitely not
> accept any proposal to use a standard license, so writing him about that
> would be a waste of time.
> 
>     This is definitely not DFSG free, and also not FSF free, so normally I
>     would expect that we cannot include it in TeX live.
> 
> I'm not sure why you conclude it is not FSF free.  I think it is FSF
> free (rms reluctantly accepted original latex with the "must rename"
> clause).  I don't plan to remove it from TL.

as far as phil is concerned, the licence is the same as the licence
for tex.  we _know_ that the licence for tex is odd; while phil taylor
doesn't have the monumental status that knuth has, i don't see why we
should accept tex and not ukhyphen, as karl remarks:

> I fail to see any significant difference between saying "you can't
> redistribute a modified version under the name hyphen.tex", and "you
> can't redistribute a modified version under the names hyphen.tex,
> hyphenfoo.tex, and hyphenbar.tex".  Which would be analogous to what's
> going on here.  Or is hyphen.tex (and plain.tex and ...) also not
> DFSG-free?  Presumably you've already concluded they are ok, or Debian
> would have removed TeX entirely.
> 
> If Phil was trying to lay claim to generic filenames, I would see that
> as a serious problem, but he's not.

he does have that about him, but not in this instance.

robin

[who was very irritated that his native hyphenation patterns weren't
in public distributions prior to this agreements, and will be
irritated again if after all the effort to get agreement on some sort
of licence statement the thing drops out again.]